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The flagpole may have been flying the stars and stripes in holiday classic A Christmas Story as Flick (Scott Schwartz) folds in the face of a “triple dog-dare” and ends up with his tongue stuck to the frozen metal.

But the scene was shot outside Victoria Public School in St. Catharines, with excited Canadian kids playing the bystanders and classmates — all for $1 each with another $3.50 an hour per child going to the school board.

It’s among the many Canadian-shot scenes Oakville entrepreneur and arguably the film’s biggest fan, Tyler Schwartz (no relation to Scott), deconstructs in his new book A Christmas Story Treasury, written to help mark 30 years since the movie’s release on Nov. 18, 1983.

The stuck tongue has become such a classic movie moment, it’s been immortalized in a bronze statue at the Indiana Welcome Center in Hammond, Ind., the hometown of Jean Shepherd. The radio raconteur whose broadcast stories of his childhood captivated writer-director Bob Clark (director of Canadian box office titan, Porky’s). Clark was determined to turn the kid-centred tales into a holiday film.

Clark was killed, along with his 22-year-old son Ariel, by a drunk diver in 2007.

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Thirty years ago, audiences first saw Flick get stuck to the pole, watched little Randy (Ian Petrella) snuffle through a plate of mashed potatoes to show “how the piggies eat” and heard 9-year-old Ralphie Parker (Peter Billingsley) make his breathless, pleading speech to a crabby department store Santa that his holiday heart’s desire was an official Red Ryder BB gun.

Schwartz, whose doc Road Trip for Ralphie followed his search for A Christmas Story filming locations, now runs Retrofestive, an online-based pop culture Christmas retailer. It sells, among other things, various sizes of the famous leg lamp that Ralphie’s dad receives with glee in the movie.

A Christmas Story Treasury shares behind-the-scenes facts and interviews with production crew members — including one of the makers of the leg lamp, Toronto special effects creator and now Beamsville winery owner, Martin Malivoire. Those True North details are the facts Schwartz was most anxious to share with A Christmas Story fans, especially those south of the border.

“I was excited to try to bring the Canadianism of it all,” said Schwartz. “Here’s the movie that’s become huge, right there with The Wizard of Oz and all those other classics and it was filmed on a shoestring budget in and around Toronto, largely by Canadians doing it for the love of film.”

“Nobody expected that,” said Malivoire, 64, of the immense popularity of the leg lamp, the “major award” won by Ralphie’s dad (Darren McGavin) that was dreamed up by Shepherd’s imagination and brought to the screen by production designer Reuben Freed.

Malivoire also made that famous flagpole and got a good chuckle out of the news his design has been immortalized in a bronze statue.

“He (Malivoire) told me they actually got a chubby-legged model and made a plaster cast from her leg and made a mould out of it,” laughed Schwartz. “They made a couple of versions — this is stuff nobody knows and for all the fans out there this is really interesting stuff.”

Sadly the identity of the leg model has been forgotten and the last remaining leg lamp in his possession — dusty and unappreciated after years in the window of Malivoire’s former special effects shop on Booth Ave. — was destroyed in the early 1990s, just before A Christmas Story found new life on TV.

“At that time, there was no value to them,” said Malivoire, who still has one of the customized Red Ryder BB Guns he adapted for use by the left-handed Billingsley onscreen.

“I tracked down the artist who painted the leg lamp and the guy who fabricated it and they were all so modest and unassuming and maybe not appreciating how huge the leg lamp has become,” added Schwartz, who sells about 1,000 leg lamps in Canada each year. “In the States, it’s huge.”

“I’m a Canadian and so it doesn’t ring home to the same extent it does to my American friends,” said Malivoire, who still watches A Christmas Story every year. “I spend my winters in Florida and everybody is all so keen; they dress up like Ralphie. I guess it just hits them in the right way.”

“It was a Canadian movie by and large,” said Schwartz. “All the interiors were filmed in Scarborough, all the outside scenes around Toronto (and St. Catharines) and people should embrace that and be proud of that.”

Schwartz will be sharing his stories with a crowd of like-minded people in Cleveland Nov. 29 and 30 at A Christmas Story convention and 30th anniversary celebration. The exterior of the Parker’s yellow-frame house — which is open for tours — and the now-shuttered Higbee’s department store where the visit-to-Santa scenes were shot, are located in the Ohio city.

When A Christmas Story hit theatres, it was a modest success, making about $2 million opening weekend. The reviews were mixed, although The Star’s Christopher Hume praised it, writing, “with his latest movie, A Christmas Story, director Bob Clark might have single-handedly revived a dying genre — the family film.”

It began finding new fans via TV in the late 1980s and early 1990s, eventually landing on Turner Broadcasting’s TNT. Starting in 1997, it was screened continuously for 24 hours over Dec. 24 and Dec. 25, moving to Turner TBS sister station in 2004. TBS says the movie averaged 3 million viewers, with a total accumulated audience of 48.8 million over the 24 hours. The marathon continues this year.

Meanwhile, DVD sales also made it easy to see A Christmas Story at home and watching the moviesoon became an essential part of many holiday traditions.

A Christmas Story was added to the National Film Registry of the Library of Congress in 2012, deemed a film that is “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant.”

“I think it’s not one thing, it’s a mixture of things,” said Schwartz of the movie’s appeal. “It couldn’t be anything if it didn’t have the heart that it does. It’s got this innocence … you don’t often see in films these days.”

“The key thing for A Christmas Story is precisely that it’s smart and crude enough to be of interest to the adults of the family but still genuine enough to be of interest to kids in the family as well,” observed Paul Moore, associate sociology professor at Ryerson University and president of the Film Studies Association of Canada.

Bart Testa, senior lecturer in cinema studies at the University of Toronto, adds A Christmas Story is nothing like sentimental seasonal classics like It’s A Wonderful Life and that helps it speak to a contemporary generation.

“It’s a Christmas movie that refuses sentiment for the entire span of the film,” he said, adding the events are instantly recognizable pieces of childhood: yearning for a BB gun, fear of breaking your glasses, bullies and visiting Santa.

And then there’s Ralphie’s brash and impatient father, who is only known to audiences as “the old man.”

“That type of father is still going strong. His name is Homer Simpson,” said Testa.

Added Schwartz: “It doesn’t get much bigger than A Christmas Story … this movie will be up with there with The Wizard of Oz and Gone With The Wind. It will last.”

10 facts about a Christmas Story

How to watch: A Christmas Story is available on iTunes, through Amazon.ca and Warner Bros. at www.wbshop.com . It airs Dec. 23 at 8 p.m. on CBC. Check local listings for other TV info.

1. The original script called for the old man to swear — more than 35 times. Higbee’s department store, where the Santa scenes were filmed, didn’t want to be associated with a swearing dad. Hence the hilarious gibberish Darren McGavin spouts in the movie.

2. Speaking of swearing, Ralphie was originally indeed supposed to say “the queen mother of dirty words” and actually does in a few takes. The famously funny “oh fudge!” in the film was added last minute while shooting in Toronto on the southwest side of the Cherry St. drawbridge, between Polson St. and Unwin Ave.

3. A Christmas Story was nominated for nine Genie Awards and won for Best Screenplay and Best Directing, with Bob Clark sharing the honour with David Cronenberg (for Videodrome).

4. The young cast spent a lot of time on the Higbee’s Santa slide in between takes, but not Ian Petrella (Randy), who was terrified of it. Those tears you see onscreen are the real deal.

5. Production designer Rueben Freed found the frame Parker house by asking a taxi driver to take him to the area where The Deer Hunter was filmed. “I knew the house was perfect right away,” he said.

6. The Flick flagpole was made from a sailboat mast. A hole fitted with a vacuum pump made Flick’s tongue appear to stick. “It worked really well and the kid played it really well,” said Martin Malivoire, who did special effects on the movie.

7. Toronto actress Tedde Moore, who plays teacher Miss Shields, was pregnant during filming. She was padded all over to conceal her bump.

8. Three Red Ryder BB Guns were modified by Malivoire for left-handed Billingsley, the logos moved to the other side of the stock. It was also modified so he could cock and shoot it with ease.

9. A snow-free January in otherwise chilly Toronto meant problems. The filmmakers considered trucking in snow but that was too costly. A rented snow-making machine created the backyard winter wonderland for the Christmas morning scene. For the rest, they used potato flakes, firefighting foam, shredded vinyl and even ice-clearing snow from a local arena.

10. There are lost fantasy scenes — among the most costly in the picture — where Ralphie rescues Flash Gordon from Ming the Merciless and later, Santa from bandits. MGM declared the film too long and the scenes, shot at Toronto’s Magder Studios on Pharmacy Ave., were lost.

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